Okay, I’m sure everybody wishes the election could go on for another two years, but unfortunately, it’s soon to come to a close.

There’s an article by Adam Ostrow in Mashable today that pointed me to what has to be the funnest (in Applespeak) website I’ve run into in a long time.

It’s called Attack Ad Generator, and it gives users the ability to utilize images and words to create your own nasty attack ad.

I made one myself that I personally believe could tilt the election in favor of Barack Obama (though I am still undecided, really. Honest.)
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Google just doesn’t seem to cease in rolling out really cool stuff. Now, they have developed technology that allows them to index scanned PDF files. Google is already able to read documents saved as PDFs, but will now also have access to scanned PDFs.

There are tons of government and scholarly articles on the web whose only search engine friendly properties are metadata. Now, using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, Google can scan these files and convert them to text files that are readable by the search engines.
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A study of over 1,000 social network users by Razorfish reveals that 75% of social network users don’t mind the ads they see on the networks, and 40% report they have utilized the ads and purchased something through them.

However, I’ve noticed many reporting mixed results in their advertising schemes on social networks. Perhaps users don’t mind them because they aren’t that effective? At any rate, Razorfish’s Garrick Schmit makes the essential point about social networking, saying, “Content, in our view, will become advertising.” In other word, the ads and the content of what users are viewing on the network will fuse into one and be the impetus behind social network advertising. See: Facebook Beacon.

When it comes to video advertising–which nobody seems to have perfected yet–users report preferring ads that are incorporated into the video rather than pre-roll ads. This is not exactly a surprise, especially when viewing short ads and taking into account the human instinct of instant gratification.
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Ever surfing the net with your iPhone and wish you could analyze a website’s SEO? Now, for about $15, you can do it to it with Infinidigm’s iPhone SEO Content Analyzer.

So how popular is SEO-on-the-go going to be? I suppose it depends on the individual SEO expert. For those that see this as another excuse to get rid of lugging their laptop around on semi-casual long-term ventures, it makes some sense. For those that like to tool around on their iPhone, reading RSS feeds before they fall asleep (which is where I often use my E71) and might check a link and look at some SEO, it could be helpful there as well.
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To start off, a remarkable statistic from a survey of 340 worldwide senior marketing executives by McKinsey & Co: 91% of marketers are using online advertising, and an astounding 55% of marketers say they will slash their more traditional media spending for the sole purpose of expanding their online marketing efforts.

That says just about everything that needs to be said: top marketers are eschewing print, tv, and radio in favor of online advertising as the economy worsens. Why? A report on eMarketer makes some of the points we’ve heard before, but I’ll repeat them to emphasize their importance.
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One of the biggest pains about getting Mac in March was that Netflix Watch Instantly didn’t work on Mac. In fact, the main reason I wanted to get XP on my Mac through Bootcamp was so I could use this feature, especially after they teamed up with Starz and added over a 2500 extra movies.

Now, instead of Flash, Netflix will roll out the feature using Microsoft’s Silverlight.
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Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch is reporting that YouTube is now letting users add a short tag to the end of YouTube URLs that allows users to cut straight to a particular moment in a video. Instead of linking and telling the user to cut forward to a certain time, now the link is smart enough to send you there automatically.

Here’s an example of the best part from this awesome video I saw the other day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0#t=2m07s. All you have to do is add the “t=” and then the time in “2m07s” format. It’s that simple.

Google Video had this feature previously, so it’s a mystery it took this long to make it happen on YouTube.

I have a somewhat dead personal blog that I’m lazy about updating and haven’t spent much time on. I’m not a coding expert, and the front page has about 120 errors right now. When I do write, I don’t often take the time to link to other sites. Often I just splash out some text, throw in a few tags, and put it out there. Thus, only a couple of old articles that I actually worked on get hits, and that usually only adds up to about 5-20 per day. Pretty lame.

On 10/22, my blog got exactly one hit. Over late last night and today, it has received around 600 hits, which accounts for about 40% of the hits my poor little blog has ever received. About 60% of these hits were traffic from links on other sites, and 40% were from search engines.  These were quality, non-spammy hits. How did it happen?
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Google has launched Gmail for Mobile 2.0 today for BlackBerry and J2ME supported phones. I tried it out on my Nokia E71, and it works great, except for one problem: Nokia gives me almost immediate alerts for new mail while Gmail takes much longer.

The interface is great, and there are some new perks that will make people happy, like the ability to write email when the signal is gone (this will help big time on subways). It also allows for very simple multiple account management, which was demonstrated on my phone by easily moving between my personal and work Google Apps Gmail accounts.
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I’ve been checking out Google’s Hot Trends for awhile now, periodically checking in to see if there’s anything really hot in the tech world that would be a good idea to blog about, the idea being that if something is going “volcanic,” it’s not a bad idea to get a post up there and probably get some traffic out of it by being one of the few to write about something that is piquing the interest of so many people.

But one thing I’ve learned about Google Hot Trends: it is driven by television. The more you think about this, the more obvious it seems, of course: in order to go volcanic with a term, a large number of people have to be thinking the same way, and the only way that happens is through television.
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